Sunday, October 14, 2012

In A Permanent Save State is an interactive, artistic work by Benjamin Poynter. The short-lived iOS game — now removed from the App Store — featured a surrealist style, pairing soft colors with harsh lines and keeping a hand-drawn aesthetic throughout the experience. Poynter says the game imagines an afterlife for seven overworked employees who took their own life. The narrative found in the game was influenced by the real-life suicides that occurred in 2010 at Foxconn’s manufacturing plants, an undeniably large part of the reason the game was removed. Especially since Apple has been under fire lately for the riots and strikes at various Foxconn plants protesting poor work conditions.

Poynter described the game in more detail to The Verge via email:

“I related quite a bit to the situation of these young people and the stress that comes with not seeing the end of things. I guessed in my mind what they would have wanted to see in their eternal setting, as I had visions of it myself.”

However, following its established pattern of banning controversial applications from being downloaded in the App Store, Apple removed In A Permanent Save State after less than an hour. The exact reason it was removed, in other words which Apple guideline it violated, has not been determined. Sources familiar with the review process think it probably has to do with rules against “objectionable content” and material that “solely target a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation, or any other real entity.”